Science fiction, on an engineering schedule
For sixty years, cleaning up orbit has mostly been something people wrote papers about. Space Waste is building the hardware and software to actually do it. The centerpiece is South Star PROX-M18, a Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, Docking & Undocking (RPODU) unit in development. Today the work is research, algorithms, and simulation. No hardware has flown yet, and that is exactly why this is the interesting part.
What follows is the route from a blank page to a flight demonstrator, broken into phases tied to technology readiness levels (TRL). Each phase has to earn the next one. We are showing you the whole climb, not just the summit photo.
Concept & research
In progressEvery mission starts as an argument on a whiteboard. We are defining the South Star PROX-M18 concept of operations and the question at its heart: how do you close the last few meters on an object that is tumbling, dead, and never designed to be caught? We publish what we learn as open research. This is the foundation the whole climb stands on.
Software & simulation
In progressBefore anything flies, it has to work a thousand times on screen. We are building the six-degree-of-freedom relative-navigation logic and a computer-vision pipeline that can read the pose of a tumbling target from imagery alone. The public RPODU Simulator lets you fly the same approach problem we are solving. It is a sandbox, not flight code, but it keeps us honest and lets you watch the hard part in motion.
Ground demonstrator
PlannedScreen to steel. A hardware-in-the-loop testbed: air-bearing or robotic-arm proximity operations against a mock target, with a breadboard sensor suite running the Phase 1 brain. This is where elegant simulations meet friction, latency, and sensor noise, and where the universe tells you which of your assumptions were wishful thinking.
Subsystem qualification
PlannedMake it space-worthy. The subsystems that survived the bench go into thermal-vacuum and vibration testing; the capture interface becomes a real prototype; the deorbit-decision software gets validated against the cases that could go wrong. Nothing leaves the ground until it has earned the right to.
Flight demonstrator
TargetThe summit. A single-target, on-orbit demonstration of the terminal-phase approach: meet one real object, in the dark, moving at kilometers per second, and prove the whole chain works where it actually counts. This is a target, not a scheduled mission, and we will not put a date on it until a date is real. When it happens, you will have watched it coming for years.
SW-RM-001 · South Star Development Roadmap · Rev B · Planning document, subject to change